Anthony Sanders and Felicia Vale.
Holy shit.
Arthur Sanders.
Edwin nearly tumbled out of his chair.
The boy. Arthur Sanders.
A cold shudder shivered through his chest. The arthritis in his hands began to throb.
The boy was a curse. A reminder. The Lord Father was taking them to task, jogging their memories—rubbing it in their foolish faces: mistakes never died, responsibility never waned.
Sixteen years ago Anthony Sanders and his fiancée Felicia Vale wanted out. Sanders was a member of the church by birth. Edwin’s predecessor, Diviner Jonathon Arnold, baptized him some thirty odd years ago. Edwin remembered baby Anthony Sanders in particular because the baptism happened a few months before Arnold’s heart attack. It was the last baptism he performed before Edwin took over. Sanders was a quiet guy, kept to himself and lived his own life, only attending the necessary annual Blood Rites and monthly services. Edwin remembered nothing remarkable about Anthony before he met Felicia and came to the council asking for permission to marry outside of the church. The Sect’s rules for marrying an outsider were very clear. The candidate had to be initiated into the church and their immediate family had to be given over for sacrifice. The couple understood this (Felicia had willingly provided a list detailing her loved ones’ residences) and they were all set to follow through with their marital obligations when Anthony announced that his fiancée was pregnant.
Church law permitted them from marrying while Felicia was still with child. The marriage, and the subsequent marital rites, had to be postponed until after the baby was baptized. Seven short months later, little Arthur Sanders was born, baptized and welcomed into the fold.
Rather than honor their commitments, Anthony and Felicia, new baby in tow, up and disappeared. There was never any sort of explanation. Cold feet? Fear? Loss of faith? Reasons vanished along with them. The church kept teams active and searched for years. Yet, despite a far reaching, intricate social network, they were never able to recover the defectors. As law dictated, their families (Felicia’s easily found via her list and even Anthony’s—the church never sacrificed its own barring the families of deserters—including his mother, brother and last living grandfather) were sacrificed. Extended family, his and hers, were hunted. Death squads took out every member they could find. Upon closing the case Edwin remembered reading that eradication was only at seventy percent. Turns out the Sanders and Vale clans were quite wily. A random family member here, a random family member there, slipped away and the primary targets Anthony, Felicia and Arthur were never found.
Their evasion hung a dark cloud over the congregation. It was writ that the Lord Father was intolerant of absconders and sects allowing such were unfit for his glory. As time passed and their church grew, new members filtering in, strength building, confidence amassing, that nagging fear of retribution waned and the church gave up the chase. The Elders placated themselves with the notion that spiritual law decreed that deserters would be punished wherever they ran. There was no hiding. They would be cursed and in their torment would rue the day they ever turned their backs on their Master. Where the Church failed, the Lord Father would succeed and ensure all outstanding debts were paid.
Which was fact. Anthony and Felicia surely paid the piper, but here was their accursed son to remind the congregation of their carelessness.
All Edwin had to do was snap his fingers and the Sentinels would kill the boy. Done. Quick and easy. Unfortunately it wasn’t so simple.
Where spiritual law declared deserters would be punished it also decreed a cursed acolyte, should a congregation ever be so unlucky as to accrue one, was not to be killed or the curse would be spread throughout the church like wildfire. Instead the curse was to be tolerated, maintained and suffered by the entire sect.
The boy sitting before him, Arthur Sanders, was toxic, a cancer that could not be contained or cut. There was only one viable solution. He had to be cast away and kept as far from the sect as possible. Tabs had to be kept. He could never procreate. Extraordinary amounts of time and effort had to be put into this and until the day Arthur Sanders died the church had to protect him and keep him at an arm’s distance. Most importantly, as a new generation was ushered in, it was paramount that they never forget.
Just then, Elder Collins let himself into the room.
The fast opening door startled Edwin and his thoughts collapsed in on themselves. He slipped off the chair and his aged butt hit the hard stone floor.
Dan Collins stooped to help the Diviner up. “Jesus Ed, you okay?”
Edwin utilized Dan’s support and got back into the chair. His tailbone smarted horribly, but he ignored the Elder’s question and got right to it. “Arthur Sanders.”
“Yeah. Arthur Sanders. Melanie’s Sacrifice. He’s one of ours?”
“Arthur Sanders.” Edwin restated the name.
“Right, Arthur Sanders.” Collins stared at him quizzically.
The congregation had truly forgotten. “Sanders,” Edwin said.
Dan echoed it again, “Sanders.” His face changed about halfway through the name and then he said it again, this time with profound realization, “Sanders.”
“Your lovely daughter has brought us a curse Dan.”
Dan tried to defend the indefensible, but only ended up stammering, “She—I— ”
Edwin cut him off. Responsibility, leadership, resolve, flooded his heart and he was ready to protect his church. Standing he put a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “Look, it’s nobody’s fault. These things always come back. We couldn’t expect this to never resurface. Now that he’s here—”
“We sacrifice him.”
“No! Hell no. We can’t. A curse just doesn’t go away. If we kill this kid it will infect our entire church. We have to let him go.”
“What?”
“Not just let him go, but follow him. Forever. He has to be under constant surveillance. He can’t have kids. The curse has to die away with him. But not at our hands. This fiasco is our problem. That’s why he’s back. The Lord Father isn’t going to let us off the hook here. His parents defected, we failed to contain it, the rules are clear. If we don’t get this under control we’re screwed Dan. I have to study a little more and make sure we handle things right.”
“What the hell happened to his parents, Anthony and what was her name…Phyllis? Are they still out there?”
Arthur moaned softly and shifted in his chair.
Parks rubbed his near bald head. “Felicia. We can ask the kid before we send him off. Hopefully he knows something. Pray that they’re already dead otherwise our problem has just tripled. Tomorrow, after the Blood Rites, we need to find a team to watch him and then we need to get him as far away from us as possible. I’m thinking out of the country.”
“So we carry on then?”
Dan was worried about his daughter’s induction. Edwin could see it in his eyes. He felt the same nerves (well, maybe not exactly the same, what with this new little wrinkle) when his three daughters had their turn. “Yes. And try not to let this spoil things Dan. I’ll take care of it. You just worry about your duties, fatherly, Elderly and otherwise. Sister Melanie’s induction will go as smooth as any. She’s as smart as a whip that one. You heard she brought along a backup?”
Elder Collins smiled, “Thank the dark.”
“Indeed.” The Diviner patted his disciple on the back and turned him to the door. “Console Sister Melanie, give her hope, guide her hand. I’m going to observe young Sanders for a bit and then peruse the library for the proper tomes. I’ll crack the books. We’ll talk after tonight’s Sacrifice.”
7. REGRESSION
All of the answers lay locked within the dormant regions of Arthur’s subconscious. The How and the Why, the Where, and the When, and he wished more than anything to understand all of it. But his brain was broken and stingy—a vast, damaged network of misfiring neurons that refused to corroborate on anything. It held facts close to its gray, spongy chest
like a parent purposely withholding information for their child’s own good.
While unconscious, the shock and awe of leaping from a second story window, coupled with his glass-damaged foot, married with a healthy dose of smoke inhalation, manifested, and Arthur bounced from memory to fantasy to nightmare.
* * *
There were the ghosts—always fleeting, always flittering, abstractions in his forebrain, but as concrete as earthen clay within the deep, dark, recesses of his mind.
* * *
Adele floated within the never-space of his anti-dreams and wavered before him with the same empty, near-sullen expression she always wore. Her eyes were black, forever lost in deep, deep shadow and her lips were full blue lines, a mask of doom. But the shape of her face defied repulsion—with its high cheekbones, perfect nose, small chin and porcelain skin—even in death it was exquisite. Frozen in that perpetual pout, her beauty gave Arthur chills.
She was clothed from head to toe in stuffy, lacy material and she wore her hair in a tight bun atop her head, the epitome of the prim and proper Victorian lady, but once he hit the double digits, overrun with hormones, Arthur had begun picturing her naked, wild hair flowing past her shoulders. By turning her into a sexual fantasy her presence became much easier for his teenage mind to internalize. Murderous ghosts, even one as beautiful as Adele, didn’t sit well within his subconscious and any little condolence, a flash of skin here, a nipple there, did wonders for the psyche.
For decencies’ sake (he wasn’t a complete pervert) he also imagined a lacy scarf artfully draped strategically around her unmentionables. It was sexier that way. More mysterious. The scarf and her long dark hair were in constant motion and they continually teased, whipping around her body in slow, dreamy arcs, nearly revealing naughty bits before undulating within a soundless wind, preserving dignity while ratcheting allure.
Though his imagination permitted certain alterations, Arthur couldn’t seem to erase the lethal, ever moving straight razor from her right hand.
Dominant memory, those final moments before her suicide, Adele stood before a large ornate mirror in a corner of her Victorian era bedroom. She was fully clothed, the sleeves of her constricting dress pushed high past her elbows. The nasty straight razor shimmered at the ready from her right hand. A sick determination furrowed her brow and she looked a thousand times older than her nineteen years.
Two flashes of light.
Then the gashes. Just like the runnels that pseudo-gouged his forearms.
Then the blood.
It was weird to think that beneath the form shaping contours of that stifling dress Adele was the same being that haunted Arthur’s memory like a sullen pixie. The river of life that spurted from her wrists may have killed her and hurtled her soul into some forbidden, accidental nexus, but it also empowered and filled her arrested heart with the confidence she seemed to lack in life. Death destroyed her, true, but in a way it also saved her, and drifting through his mind’s eye, blade hand twitching wildly, there was an intense potency to her presence.
* * *
Giuseppe.
Red rage.
Trigger man.
From the top of his Dippity-Do hair to the tips of his wing-tipped A. Testoni’s, the beast left furious impressions and whorls of dark angry bruises on the undersides of Arthur’s brain.
With a bulldog face and an army of pent-up frustration, Giuseppe’s presence made Arthur sweat nervous rivers.
Unlike with Adele and Fred, era was indeterminate. The bear dressed like a mobster. He seethed like a mobster. He regretted like a mobster, overflowing Arthur’s emotions with teeth grinding feelings of sorrow and wrath. The smart suit, the spiffy shoes, the guido hairstyle were timeless mobster staples and the place of his death, a back alley that looked like any other back alley in any other major metropolis, offered no help in figuring through if he was from the forties or fifties or sixties or any other decade up through Arthur’s birth.
The blood soaked vision of his suicide haunted deeply. More so than Adele’s slashed wrists or Fred’s wild hanging. They were both rough scenarios to be sure, but they paled in comparison to the brutal imagery of Giuseppe putting the revolver to his right temple and blowing his pink-red-white brains out the other side. The impression was so strong it affected all of Arthur’s senses. His ears rang, his nose stung, his eyes watered and there was a distinct taste in his mouth, like sucking on metal.
* * *
Fred came off like a manic clown. The tortured smile that split his face into a wicked leer was appropriate, and despite the hollow sockets, his dark eyeholes seemed to sparkle with radiant malevolence. His presence, though stressful (when the mad cowboy was in control Arthur felt like he was going out of his skull) was less disconcerting, less sorrow-tinged (Adele), less rageful (Giuseppe), but all the more maddening.
Deliriously so.
Unhinged.
Dangerous.
Ride ‘em cowboy crazy!
Just assessing made Arthur’s dream-self sweat with wild worry.
The suicide scene was as rowdy as the unruly ghost’s nature. Why a cocksure cowboy like Fred wanted to kill himself was as much a mystery as why Adele or Giuseppe went through with it, but their deaths somehow made sense. In both cases, the beauty and the mobster, Arthur felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow. Desperation emanated from their ethereal beings in thick, suffocating droves. He didn’t have to have the answers to feel why they might have been driven to take their own lives. Not with Fred. He was a livewire. An outlaw. Machismo and cocky from the brim of his low-tilting Stetson to the heels of his boots, his ghost had a swagger that was anything but sorrowful or despondent.
The suicide situation was evident nonetheless. Arthur had a clear picture of the guy stringing a rope over a thick Joshua tree branch, lining up a black horse and then with a loud, “Yee ah!” shooing the stallion out from under him. His black boots swung and his body convulsed until the stillness of death washed over him like a fast fog.
Of all the wounds, Arthur hated Fred’s neck mangling the most. It was the pinnacle of discomfort and worse, never mind his stupid seeping pseudo-wound, the mad ghost’s murderous leavings were extreme to say the least. When Arthur thought of that rough hunk of fiber a flurry of shudders traverse his spine.
Fear the rope.
Should you be unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of Fred’s wrath, fear the rope, pray for a nice clean slashing or a quick ecto-bullet to the brain, but fear the rope. Over the years Arthur had the displeasure of witnessing the aftermath of one of Fred’s victims (one was enough) and the poor target’s neck had been nearly bisected by the rope. The trauma was rough and ragged and ugly, ugly, ugly.
* * *
These weren’t their names of course.
They could be their names, they seemed like their names, but Arthur had no way of knowing for sure. Somewhere along the line, age four, age seven, age ten, he supposed his brain just took up the initiative and named them. Every three years, the monikers stuck and they felt right.
Maybe the information had been delivered to him on a subconscious level. Maybe, but the elusive answers were locked away tight, and since there was no direct communication with any of his ghosts it was impossible to know one way or another. The specters didn’t talk or acknowledge Arthur, instead they hid behind daily thoughts, surfacing from his gray matter from time to time, causing him to question his sanity and their existence. And every three years or so, once the wounds began opening and the killings began to take place, he could see them here and there, mute, dead-eyed, flickering, intermittently perceptible as they set upon the physical world to claim their victims.
* * *
There were his parents—more impressions then actual living beings (as they were long deceased). They existed in his memory as Gods as Futures as Wombs.
Remembering them made his heart hurt.
Oh, the loss of love, the impossibility of true warmth.
* * *
A day at the beach.
He could remember his mama’s smile the most, his dad’s too, though it was always veering on uncertain, always drooping and wavering, but his mom’s grin—solid and sure, brightened the world. It rivaled the sun, casting rays of love that made the shimmering ocean and the bright white sands pale, drab blurs of almost color.
She made them salami sandwiches and in between bouts of swimming (well, carrying, Arthur was only three and not old enough to brave the ocean without clinging to a parent) they took snack breaks.
Arthur remembered the sweaty lunch meat and the bits of sand sticking to it, how with each bite the stray granules added a grainy crunch that elicited him to stick his tongue between his lips and blow in an effort to filter the unwanted dirt. How his parents laughed at his crinkled face and futile displeasure. Little Arthur felt the little hairs on the back of his little neck stand up with each guffaw. How dare they laugh at his displeasure! How could they make light of such a serious situation? Offended, he stormed away from them, tiny hands balled into tiny fists, brow furled, blind determination pumping his bow-legged legs toward the roaring ocean.
He managed to make it as far as wet sand before his dad scooped him up and spun him round. One revolution, two, and then his mama was there hugging his dad, little Arthur sandwiched between them, and it was remarkable how the anger that boiled his three year old blood was instantly trumped by giggling pleasure and happy-headed warmth.
It was a small moment but it typified what could have been—anger and frustration without weight, nullified by the levity of a playful hug.
The moment played over and over, faster and faster until the ocean, the sand, the warm breeze, the white teeth and smiling lips of his parents, whirled like spin art, streaks of color muddled to abstraction.
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